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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."

MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport."

bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week which finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the US District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting."Update: 10/28 16:23 GMT by T: Headline updated to reflect that this is a Federal District Court located in Pennsylvania, rather than a court of the Commonwealth itself.

A highly customizable UI is not necessarily a benefit. I sometimes happen to think about the end-user ease of use, but it doesn't seem to be the case of some of the slashdot crowd, who can't seem to account for different uses than theirs. A standardized (if not locked-up) UI is a good thing for the basic end user.

Dear God, if you had happened to actually read the whole article, you would have noticed that the guy actually thought about buying a MacBook.

Some people prefer the pain that it is to reboot to Windows or use another machine for performing such common tasks as using photoshop and powerpoint... Some other prefer OS X to Linux for its ease of use, standardized UI, and excellent popular software availability.

macs run osx AND windows AND linux, so my post is absolutely in topic. finally, if my comment is so useless, how useful is yours ??? my guess is that you are just another frustated mac-hating windows & linux techie... c'mon buy a mac, stop pricking us and finally use a really decent computer !